Rethinking the Lectionary

Like most Baptists, I grew up in a church where the pastor's sermon was a major focus of weekly worship. Usually those sermons were well crafted expositions of a passage of Scripture, often selected intentionally as part of a sermon series. My pastor liked to preach sequentially through a single book of the Bible at the time and he rarely preached topical or thematic messages. He famously (or infamously as the case may be) refused to preach a Mother's Day sermon because it would have interrupted his series on Romans, if I remember correctly.

After I was called to ministry and went to seminary (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) I encountered a number of different preaching styles, which of course, is the purpose of education. I was not introduced to the concept of a lectionary, however, until I had graduated and purchased a minister's manual to help me with officiating at funerals, the Lord's Supper, and baby dedications. An appendix in that little manual gave me my first look at a lectionary.

A lectionary is a book or listing that contains a collection of Scripture readings appointed for Christian worship on a given day or occasion. Lectionaries commonly include readings from the Old Testment, the Psams, the New Testament Epistles, and the Gospels for each Sunday or Christian holiday of the year. Lectionaries are further organized into three years of these Scripture readings, designated Year A, B, and C. Here is a link to a well-known on-line lectionary used in the USA:

The Revised Common Lectionary

So you might ask, why don't most Baptists use a lectionary? Well, Baptists are firmly in the free-church tradition, with every church autonomous. Unlike connectional faith groups, no authority exists outside of the local church to decide what Scriptures should be used on any particular Sunday (or any other worship material, for that matter). That being said, I have come to believe that lectionaries do have value, should a local church choose to take advantage of them.

I came to that conclusion after a conversation I head in Africa with a missionary who was tranlating the Bible in a local language. He had been sent out from a church group that did use the lectionary, and he had decided to use the lectionary as a pacing chart for his translation efforts. When I asked him why he was taking that approach he made this observation: a lectionary covers most of the Bible in three years and if he followed the lectionary he would make slow but steady progress in translating the whole Bible during his term of service before returning to the USA on furlough. Point taken! For him the lectionary was sound tool and guide for accomplishing his mission.

I too have a mission: As a National Guard chaplain who will retire in 12 months, I want to provide an integrated set of helps for other chaplains to use in ministry. This will include for each week of the year a video of a devotional thought, a written message or sermon outline, and an order of worship. To accomplish my task, I too, will take advantage of a lectionary, the one I linked to above. I hope and trust my colleagues and others will find these resources useful. More to come soon!

Every blessing,

Otis Corbitt